Boulder County Clerk Hillary Hall says a new system for numbering ballots would preserve voter anonymity as well as efficiency in tallying election results, and she expects it to pass muster with the Secretary of State's Office.

However, election integrity activists say any "distinguishing marks" on ballots violate the law and open the door to linking individual voters with their ballots.

The group Citizen Center has filed a request for a restraining order in federal court to stop the printing of Boulder County's ballots with distinguishing serial numbers. A hearing on the request is scheduled for Sept. 21.

Like other counties who use the Hart Voting System, Boulder County's ballots have three sets of numbers and bar codes -- one that identifies the election, one that identifies the precinct and ballot content (which jurisdictions and ballot questions the voter is voting on) and one that identifies the ballot.

Until recently, every Boulder County ballot had a unique number that distinguished it from every other ballot. That number made it easy for election workers to retrieve a specific ballot if it wouldn't scan properly or had over- or undervotes that needed to be assessed manually.

However, election integrity activists contended that through comparisons with voter rolls, those unique numbers could reveal how individual voters voted.

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Citizen Center, an election integrity advocacy group, filed suit in federal court to block the printing of ballots with unique numbers. In an attempt to resolve the issue, Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler issued an emergency ruling earlier this year that prohibited any identifying markings on ballots. Two other counties -- Chaffee and Eagle-- complied, but Hall offered another solution.

The identifying ballot numbers will be repeated a minimum of 10 times, including on ballots within the same precinct and with the same ballot content. That means the ballot number will not be unique. However, it will still allow election workers to identify problematic ballots because the number will be unlikely to appear more than a few times in a given batch of ballots to be scanned. In Boulder County, election workers scan ballots 150 at a time.

Hall acknowledged that the previous system would have allowed ballots to be identified, though she said there has never been a case of a voter being connected with a ballot.

"If it were true, then it would be an issue," Hall said of the contention that Boulder County ballots have identifying numbers. "Anonymity trumps efficiency any day of the week, but we don't have to choose. We can have anonymity, and we can have efficiency."

Marilyn Marks, president of Citizen Center, said Hall's proposed solution still leaves open the possibility that voters and ballots could be connected.

"No one -- not the government, not the clerk, not the workers and not voters -- should be able to tell which ballot is which," she said.

And, Marks said, the law is clear that there should be no distinguishing marks on the ballots, regardless of the details of how those numbers are distributed.

"There is no way they can keep this information safe," Marks said. "Every computer is hackable. If these big banks can't keep their data safe, how is Boulder County going to keep their information safe?"

Andrew Cole, a spokesman for the Secretary of State, said state election officials are working with Boulder County to ensure its procedures protect voter anonymity. On initial review, Hall's plan seemed acceptable, but the Secretary of State's Office is waiting for a more detailed plan before granting a waiver to state rules.

Every other county has complied with the order, Cole said. However, the Secretary of State's Office also wants Boulder County to be able to use procedures with which election workers are familiar.

"Our No. 1 goal is to preserve anonymity of voters," Cole said. "We also want to make sure counties can use the best process to tabulate their votes, because this is a big election."

Hall said she has a variety of "contingency plans" in place should a federal judge grant the restraining order, though she declined to discuss the details.

However, she said drastically changing vote-counting procedures shortly before a presidential election carries its own risks. Without identifying -- if not unique -- numbers on the ballots, election workers would need to develop different procedures for dealing with ballots that get flagged or need additional review, she said.

"Using the same number (on every ballot) creates its own set of risks heading into a general election with new processes that have never been tried before," she said. "It's easy to come up with a solution when you don't have to implement it."

Election integrity activists have suggested that ballots could be stamped with a unique number before being scanned, but that number would not be connected in any way with the voter.

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